the church was illegal. This decision the House of Lords, on appeal to it, confirmed, Lords Brougham and Cotten- ham, in delivering judgment, stating it expressly to be their opinion that in settling a minister the church had no legal right to look beyond his qualification as to " life, literature, and morals." In this decision, as involving a forfeiture of the benefice, the church acquiesced, declaring at the same time her intention, for her own spiritual objects, to interpret for herself the statutes which established her, and announcing her unaltered purpose to protect her congregations from the intrusion of unacceptable ministers. It speedily appeared that she was not to be permitted to carry out these resolutions if the Court of Session could pravent. The presbytery of Dunkeld rejected a licentiate presented by the Crown to the parish of Lethendy on the ground of his having been vetoed by the people. The Crown acquiesced and issued a new presentation. At the instance of the first presentee the Court of Session inter dicted the presbytery from ordaining the second. The church ordered the presbytery to proceed with the ordina tion. It did so, and was summoned in consequence to the bar of the civil court, solemnly rebuked, and informed that in the next instance of such disregard by the church of the interdict of the civil court imprisonment would be the punishment. In the parish of Marnoch, with a population of 2800 souls, only one individual signed the call ; an overwhelming majority dissented ; but in defiance of the law of the church, and in obedience to the Court of Session, the presbytery of Strathbogie, by a majority of 7 to 3, resolved to proceed to the ordination. To prevent this ordination the church suspended the seven ministers who formed the majority. The Court of Session not only annulled that suspension and prohibited the church from intimating or executing it, but interdicted all ministers from preaching or administering any of the sacraments within any of the parishes of the seven suspended clergymen. The church held such interference as a violation of her spiritual independence, and proceeded as if no such sentence of the civil court had been passed, many of the most distinguished ministers, Dr Chalmers and Dr Gordon among the rest, preaching in those parishes in the face of interdicts served on them personally. The seven suspended clergymen treated in the same way the supreme ecclesiastical authority, and on the 21st January 1841, in opposition to an express order of the General Assembly, consummated the ordination. By the following General Assembly these clergymen were deposed from the office of the ministry. The Court of Session immediately thereafter pronounced the deposition null and void. Other like instances occurred. The collisions between the two supreme courts became frequent and most unseemly. Matters were running into inextricable c infusion. The church appealed to the Government to interfere. At first the Whigs were in power, but they declined to interfere. In 1841, Sir Robert Peel was placed at the head of a Government strong enough to have applied the remedy, and the hopes of the church were excited. Still no measure was intro duced. Under the guidance of Dr Chalmers the church pursued her course with steady unfaltering step ; but she was not prepared to prolong the controversy indefinitely. Denying the right of the Court of Session to act as it had done, she freely conceded to the legislature the right of determining on what terms she held her temporalities ; and if, fairly appealed to, the legislature declared that she held them on condition of rendering such obedience to the civil courts as they now required, she felt that she had no alternative but either to renounce her own principles or relinquish the temporalities. At a solemn convocation held in November 1842 a large number of ministers signed and published a declaration that if no measure of relief were 377 granted they would resign their livings. Up to the last, however, it was not believed that any very extensive secession would take place. In January 1843, the Government not only refused to grant the protection the church required, but put a final and peremptoiy negative on her claims of spiritual independence. And in March the House of Commons did the same by a large majority, the Scotch members, however, voting in the proportion of more than two to one in her favour. The controversy was now closed, and it remained only for those clergymen who felt that they could not with a good conscience submit to the civil restraint imposed upon the church to adopt the only expedient now left to them and retire from the Establishment. On the 18th May 1843, 470 clergymen withdrew from the General Assembly and constituted themselves into the Free Church of Scotland, electing Dr Chalmers as their first moderator. For two years previous to this final step, Dr Chalmers had foreseen the issue, and in preparation for it had drawn up a scheme for the support of the outgoing ministers. For a year or two afterwards the establishment and exten sion of that fund, to which the Free Church owes so much of her stability, engaged a large share of his attention. He then gradually withdrew from the public service of the church, occupying himself with his duties as principal of the Free Church College, and in perfecting his Institutes of Theology. In May 1847, he was summoned before a committee of the House of Commons to give evidence regarding that refusal of sites for churches in which a few of the landed proprietors of Scotland who were hostile to the Free Church were still persisting. He returned from London in his usual health, and after a peaceful Sabbath (May 30) in the bosom of his family at Morniugside, he bade them all good night. Next morning, when his room was entered and the curtains of his bed withdrawn, he was found half erect, his head leaning gently back upon the pillow, no token of pain or struggle, the brow and hand when touched so cold as to indicate that some hours had already elapsed since the spirit had peacefully departed. During a life of the most varied and incessant activity, spent much too in society, Dr Chalmers scarcely ever allowed a day to pass without its modicum of composition. He had his faculty of writing so completely at command that at the most unseasonable times, and in the most unlikely places, he snatched his hour or two for carrying on his literary work. He was methodical indeed in all his habits, and no saying passed more frequently from his lips than that punctuality is a cardinal virtue. His writings now occupy more than 30 volumes. He would permanently perhaps have stood higher as an author had he written less, or had he indulged less in that practice of reiteration into which he was so constantly betrayed by his anxiety to impress his ideas upon others. It would be pre mature to attempt to estimate the place which his writings will hold in the literature of our country. We may briefly indicate, however, some of the original contributions for which we are in debted to him. As a political economist he was the first to unfold the connection that subsists between the degree of the fertility of the soil and the social condition of a community, the rapid manner in which capital is reproduced (see Mill s Political Ecmiomy, vol. i. p. 94), and the general doctrine of a limit to all the modes by which national wealth may accumulate. He was the first also to advance that argument in favour of religious establishments which meets upon its own ground the doctrine of Adam Smith, that religion like other things should be left to the operation of the natural law of supply and demand. In the department of natural theology and the Christian evidences, he ably advocated that method of reconcil ing the Mosaic narrative with the indefinite antiquity of the globe which Dr Buckland has advanced in his Bridgewater Treatise, and which Dr Chalmers had previously communicated to that author. His refutation of Hume s objection to the truth of miracles is perhaps his intellectual chef iTaeum, and is as original as it is com plete. The distinction between the laws and dispositions of matter, as between the ethics and objects of theology, he was the first to indicate and enforce. And it is in his pages that the fullest and most masterly exhibition is to be met with of the superior authority as witnesses for the truth of Revelation of the Scriptural as com pared with the ex-Scriptural writers, and of the Christian as com- pared with the heathen testimonies. In his Institutes of Theology,
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